


sentimental effects

by sorrymom



Series: space [2]
Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: F/F, jenine don't read, kai don't read, nico don't read, tbh the ships aren't the point, yes there are wayv boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26492308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrymom/pseuds/sorrymom
Summary: In desert island you’re usually asked who you would want to be marooned with. Who you’ll spend your days with drinking from the streams. Who will help you reach the coconuts. Who will spell out ‘help’ on the beach with sand angels.Who you’ll end up cannibalizing.Whose heart you’ll eat.For this mission, Sana doesn’t get to choose.
Relationships: Minatozaki Sana/Yoo Jeongyeon, slight samo - Relationship
Series: space [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926064
Comments: 9
Kudos: 87





	sentimental effects

**Author's Note:**

> M for general existentialism and one vague sexual reference

In 1977, the Voyager space probe passes the moon. 

It looks like an insect that natural selection would have snuffed out millions of years ago. It’s a Frankenstein of antennas with a gyroscope for a brain. 

Its heart comes in the form of a gold-plated record. Engraved in the grooves are the songs of whales, a recording of a baby crying, symphonies and folk music, greetings in fifty-five different languages. 

===

On the ship, there are three languages.

Jeongyeon speaks Korean. 

Sana and the others can get by, all varying levels of fluent, but she speaks Japanese with Mina and catches a few words when Yukhei and Kunhang mutter to each other in Mandarin. 

“I know I’m not holding onto the vowels long enough,” she says to the captain one day. Or maybe one night. It’s hard to tell when there’s no reference point, all the stars staring through the porthole window like children at a zoo. “I’ll get better for you.” 

Jeongyeon doesn’t glance up from the dashboard of levers and blinking lights. “You’re fine.” 

“I need a project,” Sana says lightly. 

There’s something so charming about the captain when she looks confused. “We’re going to Mars, Sana-ssi.” 

===

Most of the crew has some new hobby they’ve adopted for the purpose of either self-improvement or defeating boredom. 

“It’s like purgatory,” Yukhei says. He always talks loud, even packed into the narrow shuttle. “Get better or go to Hell.” 

Kunhang laughs. He laughs at everything Yukhei blurts out, which was only charming for the first few days. 

Today is two-hundred. They’re closer to Mars than they’ve ever been, and further from Earth than they’ve ever been. Which is true every day. 

Mina, who is the perfect inverse of Yukhei— the shortest, the primmest— has taken up knitting. Long strands of yarn are always floating up from her bunk bed like the tendrils of a sea anemone. Whenever she finishes a scarf or a hat, she unspools it again.

Yukhei brought an ocarina. His fingers flutter as he tries to remember Faye Wong karaoke standards. 

Kunhang fills out sheets of sudoku with a gnawed pencil. He’ll probably run out of new puzzles in a year. 

“What does sudoku mean,” he asks one day, floating past Sana as she brushes her teeth. 

She swallows down a mix of bottled water and toothpaste. “Every number by itself.” 

“What a good hobby, Huang Gua.” Yukhei laughs loud from the other end of the cabin. “Command would approve.”

Sana isn’t sure of the joke, but Kunhang flushes from his cheeks to his collar. “What does Huang Gua mean?”

“Cucumber,” Kunhang mumbles as he shrinks into a levitating somersault. 

Jeongyeon laughs loud. 

Sana’s stomach flips like she’s being dragged back to Earth on a roller coaster. 

===

“I’m not going to ask you to wait for me.” 

Sana can’t look at Momo so she stares at the gold-brushed bell of the shrine. Rain-wet maple leaves disintegrate against black pavement. 

Momo hums. She’s always been a step ahead, emotionally anticipating Sana’s moves like they’re entangled in a rigid waltz. Sometimes it’s comforting, to be known that well. Sometimes it’s lonely, to only fit right in the world when you’re across from just one person. 

“I wouldn’t ask you to wait for me, either.” Momo says. Her hands are in her pockets and Sana knows she’s twisting a coin between her fingertips, warming the copper.

“It’s not like I’m going to meet someone on Mars.” Sana forces a laugh out into the brisk autumn air. Her throat hurts like she’s been smoking or sobbing. 

Momo pulls her windbreaker tighter around her sides. “I think you could love someone anywhere.” 

It’s when they come to the doorstep of Sana’s apartment that Momo starts crying. They’re silent tears and she’s smiling through it. The storm flushes a new wave against the sky. 

“Momoring, you’re so beautiful it’s starting to rain.” 

===

There is no rain on Mars.

===

Sana meets her future crew-mates a week before they leave Earth, in one of the facility’s operatic conference halls. Pamphlets she’s already read are spread on the table like snow. 

Yukhei is leaning back in his chair, aviators low on his nose. “What’s the fraternization policy?”

Mina stiffens beside Sana, twisting the ring on her finger. 

“I mean it’s logical,” Kunhang defends, barely blushing. 

“Your mission,” the commanding officer sighs, “is to collect soil samples.” 

“So we’re responsible for our own condoms,” Yukhei mutters. 

===

The purpose of the Voyager mission was to provide images of Jupiter and Saturn. 

Delivering the record to the waiting, tender hands of aliens isn’t Voyager’s objective. It’s just a wish in its golden heart.

===

Going into space is a game of desert island. The command gives them each a small suitcase to fill with no more than twenty pounds of ‘sentimental effects.’ 

Sana spends the days before take-off sorting her apartment into cardboard boxes labeled with a faded Sharpie:

Slowly, she whittles it down to a few DVDs, her iPod Classic from high school, an old hockey shirt that Momo had returned. She wants to bring some snacks but it would just be sadder when they run out before the shuttle has even passed the moon. 

In desert island, you’re usually asked who you would want to be marooned with. Who you’ll spend your days with drinking from the streams. Who will help you reach the coconuts. Who will spell out ‘help’ on the beach with sand angels. 

Who you’ll end up cannibalizing. 

Whose heart you’ll eat. 

For this mission, Sana doesn’t get to choose.

===

“What do you tell her?” 

Sana is cross-legged, floating across from the transmission machine Mina is typing on. 

“We just talk,” Mina mumbles. “She has more to say than I do.” 

“Would I like her?” 

Mina’s fingers pirouette over the keys. “You would.” 

“More importantly, would she like me?” 

Sometimes Mina’s laughs are more like sighs. “She takes some time to warm up to people.”

Sana catches Jeongyeon’s eye from her bunk above Yukhei’s. 

===

The Voyager’s golden record won’t erode in space. 

Most likely, it will outlast any human creation. 

Most likely, it will outlast the Earth. 

===

When they land on Mars and march out in their puffy suits, Sana thinks it would be appropriate to cry. 

“Don’t,” comes Jeongyeon’s static-torn voice in her ear. “You’ll fog your helmet.” 

===

Mars is as harsh and red and perfect as a dragon. 

The air is unbreathable but also clean. There aren’t any flip-flops or soda cans littered around the rocks, no oil rigs or cell towers peeking over the mountains. 

The official language on Mars is a patchwork quilt of Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. 

Each has its own strengths and deficits, idioms and curse words that can only be conjured with certain sounds. 

“No one will understand us when we get home,” Kunhang says cheerily as he unwraps a candy bar. “We’ll be our own species.”

Sana decorates her individual quarters with a few polaroids she brought from Earth, Momo’s stolen sweater hung up over the porthole window like a curtain. 

At night, past the hum of electricity and halogen, she can hear the clicks of Mina’s keyboard, Yukhei’s ocarina, Kunhang’s choked sobs. 

Mostly Sana wonders about the other silent room. Is Jeongyeon asleep? Does she hear everything that Sana does? Is her window facing the bruised blue sunset covered too, and by what? 

Sana isn’t sure if it’s a dream when she walks barefoot across the halls and knocks lightly on the captain’s steel door. 

It doesn’t matter, because the door doesn’t open. 

Sometimes you can’t even dream yourself into what you want. 

===

Most of their duties feel like chores. 

Go out of the airlock and collect soil samples. 

Do three daily checks on the structural integrity of the base. 

Start growing plants in the greenhouse pod to supplement oxygen. 

It doesn’t help the first six months go any faster. 

Today Sana has one of the most boring tasks— tidying the living quarters. Jeongyeon has strict guidelines, stricter than the manual, so Sana has been bruising her knees for the last ten minutes, scrubbing at a red stain that’s been molded to the grout. 

“Sana-ssi.” 

She lifts up from the floor, peeking above the counter to see the captain. 

She’s tall, but not like the boys. If Sana were to stand in front of her she could perfectly brush the tip of her nose against the other woman’s sweat-slicked throat, run the edge of her tongue along the— 

“The airlock needs to be swept.” 

Sana’s mouth sours. “Of course.”

===

“So what’s her deal?” 

Sana and Yukhei are about a mile from the base, suited up, their fists curled around trowels as they dig into the flesh of Mars. 

“The captain?” 

“No, Myoui.” 

Yukhei can’t see that she rolls her eyes, so Sana makes sure her tone is flat when she says, “she’s married.” 

“I know _that_.” 

“What more do you want?” 

“Well, you’re the closest to her. I thought you’d have some, you know.” His voice softens only when he pleads. “Juice.” 

Sana licks her teeth. She isn’t the closest to Mina— that transmission box is. “Tell me Kunhang’s juice.” 

Yukhei always laughs so loud. “He has a crush on you.” 

Her heart sinks down to her stomach. 

“I know, I know,” Yukhei drawls. “Gross, right?” 

“Not gross. Just.” Sana pours some sand into the bag between them. “He should try to get over it.” 

“Why, because you have a crush on me?” 

Sana slaps his arm. It’s the first time she has touched someone in months. 

“It’s your turn,” he says, to wake her up. “Myoui juice please.” 

On Earth, Sana knew people because she decided to. She’d find someone and anchor herself to them, inch the Venn diagrams of their lives together until they eclipsed. It was that way with friendships and it was that way with Momo. 

She knows the crew in the shallow way she knew people she met at parties. She knows their never-have-I-ever checkmates, inconsequential favorite and least favorite foods, who is best at low-gravity, sober beer pong— it’s Mina— their siblings’ names and where they went to college. But that’s not the same as knowing someone. That’s not the same as thrusting your heart out of your chest and asking ‘can you love this?’ 

She knows the least about Jeongyeon. 

Which is odd.

Because they’ve slept together. 

“Mina brought a Gameboy,” is all Sana can muster. She’s glad Yukhei can’t see her face right now, because everything might be written there so plainly. She would trust him in a criss. She would trust him in an airlock breach, or an engine failure, or to catch her in the trust exercises they had to drill through before they left the Earth. 

Despite linguistics, trust doesn’t have much to do with telling the truth. 

===

There was a brochure, layered somewhere between contracts and NDAs and medical records stuffed in Sana’s desk, that said it was normal to participate in ‘risk-seeking behavior’ before take-off. 

“I need suggestions,” she says, on the phone with Chaeyoung. She’s dangerously bored in her hotel room, reading the nutritional information on a candy bar. 

“Well—“ There’s some rustling, a spike of static, then, “Skydiving?” 

“That was part of my training,” Sana sighs. It’s impossible to think of anything more risky than packing yourself into a rocket with five strangers and leaving the planet. Juggling chainsaws or running red-lights or making cruel, pleading phone calls to Momo wasn’t the cheap thrill she wanted in what could be her last few days on Earth. 

“Um. A tattoo?” 

So Sana goes to the little alley tattoo parlor, Chaeyoung lying down on one of the doctor’s-office-esque pleather tables, her shirt-sleeves rolled up. Sana flips through one of the binders full of cookie-cutter designs— tropical flowers, black panthers, bleeding hearts. 

If Sana dies on Mars, her body will be mummified with frostbite. Whatever she prints on her arm will be there forever, a message from Earth in a red desert. 

That makes her more nervous than the machines buzzing or Chaeyoung’s brave smile or the anticipation of pain. 

It makes her want Momo again, to ask ‘who am I’ and have Momo’s answer singed on her skin. 

Or maybe it would be better to do something silly and stupid, some nonsense kanji the aliens will spend centuries trying to decode. 

So Sana is drafting a few options on a notepad when the bell over the door rings and the woman who will be Jeongyeon comes in. 

Like most mistakes, Sana remembers everything in needle-prick detail— that Jeongyeon had sat beside her, knees shaking. That she had said “I felt like doing something reckless” to explain the tattoo, but ended up meaning the slide of her key into the hotel lock. That they had made their way through half the mini-bar and talked for two hours before she reached for Jeongyeon’s hand across the carpet. That she had kissed her hands first, and then her everywhere else. That Jeongyeon had wept after the first time, and Sana had wept after the second. 

All of the warnings had been there— like how after Sana was tracing nonsense ciphers on Jeongyeon’s thighs and the woman who would be the captain in the morning said, “I don’t want to leave.” 

And Sana had said, “me neither.” 

And both had meant the Earth. 

===

There is no official religion on Mars, but there are rituals. 

The crew takes all their meals together. Once a week, they watch a DVD from someone’s suitcase. Once a month, they play sardines. 

Sardines is the inverse of hide and seek, where one person hides and everyone else looks for them. They play this version because it’s less lonely— when the hider is found, they cram together in the alcove, wait and wait for more people to find them until that final reunion. 

Sana had looked through the blueprints of the base for years before take-off, but it’s different to see the white walls and halogen lights and the cemetery of solar panels off to the side. This time, when it’s her turn to hide first, she slips into the greenhouse and lays flat under the table. 

===

It was one of those pink, cicada-hazed evenings after a school festival. Sana and Momo and their friends ran back into the academy, through the unlocked doors, and played hide and seek. 

Sana had gone down to the pool. Buttery squares of sunlight shimmered over the electric blue surface. She slipped out of her uniform, folding the button-down and pleated skirt on the bleachers before lowering herself into the water. 

When the doors opened, Sana took in a deep breath and sank to the bottom of the pool, breathing up bubbles, watching for the shadow of someone to pass over her. 

But that didn’t happen. 

None of her friends were standing there, waiting, ready to laugh at how well she had hid herself. 

Momo wasn’t there to dive in with her, to kiss weightless. 

She waited longer, until the room was dark as a tomb. 

Sana walked home alone, hair stringy and dripping down her white shirt, shivering under her clothes on the bus. 

===

When Jeongyeon walks in she crouches down and whispers, “I expected better, Sana-ssi.” 

Sana just shifts across the floor, leaving a polite amount of space for Jeongyeon to lay beside her. They stare at the blank bottom of the table. 

“This will be a quick game,” Jeongyeon murmurs. 

Maybe it’s meant to be playful but tears prick at the corners of Sana’s eyes. “Okay.” 

“Sorry?” 

It’s hard to know if Jeongyeon is quizzically apologizing or asking for more context. 

“Nothing.” Sana’s throat feels stiff. “I just don’t want to play.” 

“Ah.” The captain’s fingertips drum on the floor. 

A silence goes on long enough that it gets as heavy as a cat sleeping on Sana’s chest. 

She wants to hear footsteps coming, even if it means Yukhei will tease her, even if it means Kunhang will shuffle too close when he hides with them. 

She wants to muffle the soft sounds of Jeongyeon breathing with her own mouth. 

It’s a stupid, lonely impulse. It’s erotic cabin fever. 

Jeongyeon smells like the same soap and shampoo Sana uses when she takes her thirty-second showers. Jeongyeon’s dark hair is cut choppy by scissors she must have used herself. Her chest rises in slow, even breaths under her thin white shirt. 

Sana wonders if she’s still beautiful here. There aren’t any mirrors on base, just faint reflections in the windows at night, the funhouse distortion of the kitchen’s steel sink. 

It makes her want to do something so stupid and lonely she’s nauseous with excitement. It makes her want to pounce, pin Jeongyeon’s hands, and look at herself in the other woman’s pupils with that pretty, Saturnite ring of brown rimming them. She wants a microscope. She wants to not be on Mars for a minute, and instead in the arms of—

“Have you ever thought about the worst thing happening?” Jeongyeon’s tone is conversational. She’s staring up at the table. 

Sana tucks her hand under her head, turning. “The worst thing?” 

“Like, the airlock malfunctions and we all suffocate. Or there’s a nuclear apocalypse on Earth. Or we run out of powdered food before it’s time to go back.” 

“Oh.” 

“We really are so small, aren’t we,” Jeongyeon continues, hugging her chest. “And what would be left of us?” 

“We should have gotten those tattoos.” 

Jeongyeon shrinks away. “You haven’t told anyone, right?” 

“No,” Sana huffs. She was hoping there would be some points for bravery. “But I think we should stop punishing each other.” 

The silence’s claws prick Sana’s skin. 

But it isn’t really silent. 

There’s the hiss of electric heat, the humid exhalations of the machines, the two of them breathing on a desert planet. 

===

“Do you want to listen to the rain with me?” 

Sana is sitting again on the floor of Mina’s quarters. Blood-red yarn is spooled around her hands like cuffs, Mina’s knitting needles clicking together. 

“Yes.” 

Mina fishes an ancient iPod out of her suitcase. They split the headphones and lean against each other, shoulder to shoulder. 

“I thought I would miss this most,” the other scientist says as thunder pinballs between the headphones. “Well, not the most.” 

“I wish I had thought of this,” Sana murmurs. It would be better than Momo’s ghostless jersey in her window. It would be better than a coin she can pass her thumb over as she tries to fall asleep. “But I’m glad you did,” she says, brightening her voice until Mina offers a shallow smile. 

There’s a hoodie laying on Mina’s narrow bed. 

“Do you think I’m being selfish,” Mina asks quietly as distant, digital thunder pops in their ears. 

Pre-recorded droplets splatter over a tin roof. 

“I wonder which one of us is lonelier,” Mina says, threading her fingers through Sana’s, before lightning strikes. 

===

They kiss on the street. The sun slots through the canyon of skyscrapers. 

“This is the part,” Sana sighs against the collar of Jeongyeon’s coat, “where you ask for my number.”

Jeongyeon’s hands twist nervously in her pockets. “I would. It’s just. I’m going on a trip soon.”

If there’s an arrow to Sana’s pride, she swallows it. “It’s fine. I won’t be in Korea for long anyway.” 

Jeongyeon finds the kindness to smile before she ducks into her cab. Sana watches it fade into traffic before she hails her own. 

The entire ride to the facility she’s thinking about the selfish tragedy of it, the pleasant pain in her chest, turning the conversations from the night before over like a coin in her pocket.

Then she meets her again. 

This Jeongyeon won’t even look at Sana for the length of the whole meeting. Dread and embarrassment and indignation make a cocktail in Sana’s stomach so that when the captain corners her in the hallway, all she can do is roll her eyes as Jeongyeon whispers, “I’m not going to report this.”

“Why would you?” 

“What we did was wrong.” 

Sana laughs and Jeongyeon’s wide eyes flick around the empty hallway. “We didn’t know.” 

“Right, and that’s why we’re going to forget it happened.” 

“Do we have to,” Sana can’t help but tease. 

There are footsteps around the corner. 

“Yes,” Jeongyeon hisses.

===

The inaugural crisis on Mars is when Mina’s transmission machine goes dead. 

The younger scientist’s eyes water with gasoline. 

“How do you know,” Sana groans into her pillow. She had been dreaming of wind blowing through her hair. 

“Nayeon hasn’t messaged me in fourteen hours.” 

Mina is the one to rush to wake the captain while Sana drags herself into the other woman’s quarters, squatting down to inspect the device.

In a matter of minutes, it’s five-part chaos. Jeongyeon sends the boys to check the other communication devices, Mina is pacing erratically in the closet-sized room, and Sana is crammed beneath the transmission machine beside the captain. 

“Nothing is wrong with it,” Sana protests as Jeongyeon’s elbows bump against her’s. 

“Did you check the—“

“Yes.”

“And the—“

“Twice.” 

Jeongyeon snatches the screwdriver out of Sana’s hand. 

“You might actually break it if you—“

“Who’s in charge?” 

Mina pauses, her face impossibly pale. 

Sana rolls her eyes. “Fine.” She shimmies out from beneath the machine and hoists herself up just as the pin light begins to blink and letters begin to arrange themselves on the screen—

__Don’t you think people change, like water, to fit someone else’s heart?_ _

===

A week later Sana finds a messy paper crane outside her door.

She unfolds the sudoku sheet in her lap. Kunhang has scrawled in the margins, ‘what does origami mean?’ 

Sana finds a pencil under her cot and writes that it’s just folded paper. She remakes the crane, correcting the seams, and goes to deliver it to Kunhang’s quarters. 

Which is how she runs into Jeongyeon. 

The captain yelps when their shoulders bump, immediately sliding back against the wall. 

Sana is prepared to keep walking, but she hears an irresistible, “what is that?” 

“A crane.” Her hands are cupped around it. 

“Ah.” Jeongyeon turns, awkwardly leaning. She’s holding something behind her. 

“What is that?”

“Hooch.” She brings the canister around, a reddish liquid sloshing around. “I found Yukhei’s stash.”

“Are you going to report him?” 

Jeongyeon grins. “I’m gonna drink it.” 

“Well. Have fun.” 

Sana is no more than five steps away when Jeongyeon calls, “Why the crane?” 

“Kunhang likes me.” She wishes she had a microscope to track the fluctuations of Jeongyeon’s pupils. 

“Ah.” The captain picks at her chapped lips. “So you don’t want to hang out.” 

===

Sana crushes the paper crane in her fist and brings it back to her quarters, cramming it between DVD cases in her suitcase. 

“You wouldn’t know it,” she whispers to herself, “but I think you’re beautiful.” 

It’s a shot of espresso that keeps her awake. 

It’s a grain of sugar she keeps tucked in her teeth, touching again and again to taste a brief sweetness against her tongue. 

_You wouldn’t know it._

It’s not really all that hopeful. 

_But I think you’re beautiful._

It’s not a sturdy enough sign of anything. 

It’s not the kind of statement that means she should risk any more embarrassment. 

Jeongyeon has said other things— _be professional_ —

To which, if Sana could try again, she would say “I don’t want to be.”

 _Don’t tell anyone_.

“Then talk to me about it,” she pleads with an empty room.

_You’re not the person I thought you were_. 

“Good, because I was lying.” 

_You wouldn’t know it but I think you’re beautiful._

She doesn’t want to sleep because she wants to keep thinking of these nine words, reordering them, speaking them with every possible inflection, trying to think up some trap where Jeongyeon says them again— over the static radio in their helmets, across the intercoms, as a humid whisper against the shell of her ear. 

===

Her heart has almost defeated itself when there’s a knock on the door. 

Probably Kunhang, here to blush and look at his shoes and ask if Sana had— 

But it’s Jeongyeon. 

She’s obviously tipsy, leaning against the frame with a slack-faced smile. 

“Ah, captain, I—“

She doesn’t know if she can tell Jeongyeon is about to do something drastic or if she hopes it too fiercely to believe the hands cupping her jaw, the alcohol-sour breath drifting into her mouth, the burning lips that pass as soft as a flame over her own. 

“I thought you should know,” Jeongyeon mutters almost apologetically as she slumps back. 

It’s the first kiss on Mars. 

===

“I think we should talk about our feelings,” Sana says when she’s on soil-sample duty with Jeongyeon. They’re halfway down the crater. 

“We have limited oxygen.” 

“Mine is short.” Sana slaps the captain’s arm lightly. “I like you.”

Jeongyeon’s static sigh hisses in her ear. “That’s really it?” 

“You’re wasting air, Jeongyeonie.” 

“You don’t have, like, a pitch?” 

Sana’s laugh fogs up her helmet. “You don’t like that I like you?” 

“I _do_ ,” the captain huffs. “But— that’s not a reason to like someone.” 

“But you do like me.” 

“I’m going to shut off my radio,” Jeongyeon threatens, and Sana loops their elbows together, and Mars is their world. 

===

After two weeks, Sana folds up her cot and marches down the hallway, laying it beside Jeongyeon’s. 

“This is a little fast,” she says, but it’s not a protest. She’s seated on the floor, hunched over a LEGO set. 

Later Sana will ask how many times she’s rebuilt it and Jeongyeon won’t know, only that her fingers are callused and she hardly needs the guide. 

In Japan there is a temple that is rebuilt every twenty years. It’s thousands of years old and simultaneously, barely a teenager. There are no images of it on the Voyager Record. It’s one of those secrets that will be snuffed out, one of those places that people will one day decide isn’t worth the work of nails in boards. Someone will see that it is empty, actually, or not empty, and regardless of what’s true will feel disappointed that they know the secret at all. 

“Maybe I’ll go one day,” Jeongyeon says, because they don’t say we yet. It’s too big of a promise. It will take four years to get back to Earth, and when Sana thinks of the hangar she wonders if Momo will be there. And how that will feel, and if it will be love; or if Momo isn’t there, how that will feel, and if that will be love. 

“It’s okay,” Jeongyeon always whispers when Sana blurts it out, late in the rainless night, and sleep just inches away. “You’ll figure it out.” 

And, months after that, “We’ll figure it out.” 

===

Sunsets on Mars are blue. 

“They should have sent artists instead of us,” Sana sighs, her hand pulling Momo’s jersey away from the window. “Though I guess anyone could paint a blue sunset.” 

Mina is beside her, gazing out. “It won’t ever be the same as seeing it.” 

Mars has no Voyager, no Golden Record, no people who can send out a code to the universe. No tiny voice to say ‘I’m here and I wrote symphonies. I’m here and I looked at other people and loved them sometimes. These are the languages I speak, these are the things I see everyday— a red sky and two tiny moons and volcanos so ancient they have nothing left to say.’ 

Mars will send back Sana and Jeongyeon, Mina, Yukhei and Kunhang. They won’t bring back anything more than rocks and pictures and rust-stained boots. 

“I am glad it was us,” Sana says. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading uwu


End file.
